I particularly like your drawings of the buildings! Also, it looks like you are having an easier time with learning to draw figures than I am. Don't worry, there are plenty of us...noobs? non-professionals? Erm...whatever you call them, hanging about. Also, I just used paint to re-size my pictures. It's uber easy because you can choose what percentage to scale it down by, and if you don't like the way it turns out you just click the undo button. I personally think that as long as you take a clear photo you won't lose much in the way of quality.

Being a begginer as well myself I can say im with ya on the whole intimidating thing but as woody harrelson would say either nut up or shut up
I also have to say your very good with perspective and buildings which is something I definitely need to get better at.

Also about the whole picture size issue just scan it into paint and resize it I think it messes with the quality a tiny bit but I think its better than a picture that engulfs the screen so you cant tell what your looking at.
Anyway lets drink to the ca newbie alliance

The Following User Says Thank You to triggerpigking For This Useful Post:

Thanks for the welcome and feedback. I will try my best to post more often, on my sketchbook, and also around the forums.

And yes, I'm always struggling with proportions, I guess I just need to be a better observer? Or is there some secret that I don't know about? : P

I try to avoid making small strokes when doing gesture drawings, and instead try to focus on capturing the "fluidity" of the human body. The thing is, when I try to "loosen up" I often become too loose. My lines go flying everywhere and I'm not able to capture the simplified forms. If that makes sense?

I'm not very good at cross-hatching yet, but from what I've understood so far is that the hatches are meant to travel across the form or else they'll look flat?

And here's some more stuff I did today. I realise I'm a bit of a slow worker, so I'll try update more than once tomorrow.

Hey, I'm a newbie, too!
So, I absolutely get why you may feel intimidated, you verbalized my thoughts exactly.
But it's just the matter of practise, and even the great people here started with something simple, I'm sure.

Gah, three days have passed and admittedly I've not much to show. I've been trying to instill some diligence in myself, but it doesn't take much to distract me from what is important. Just gotta keep at it though.

Anyway, here are some gestures, and an elephant study that I just started about 20 minutes ago. As you can see in my gesture drawings, I still can't seem to grasp how to convey the fluidity of the figure. Much more practice needed I suppose.

I'm still trying to understand the intricacies perspective. A problem I'm struggling with is equally spacing objects of equal width, specifically arches. Because the way I see it is that they're made up of two bounding boxes: one for the pillar and one for the arch (and the empty spaces between the pillars under the arches). I want these boxes to diminish towards the horizon line equally. I just don't get how to illustrate that accurately without resorting to freehand guessing.

Anyway, I did a couple of still life's, the top one is a cluster of small rocks and the second is pretty self-explanatory. After I established the basic shapes and contour lines of the lamp I got lost. I couldn't figure out how the light fell on it.

I'm also trying to understand the construction of the head and how to place all the features correctly. I'll try and do more proper head studies.

Also, another page of gestures. For every 50 crappy gestures I do I feel I get one that's half-way decent in conveying the motion of a pose. I've got more gesture drawings but I don't think it's necessary to post them all.

That's it for now. I will post more. Now I'm going to try and tackle perspective and maybe come up with something appealing.